Global business services maturity research program

What drives excellence in global business services? What comes out of maturing capabilities? KPMG is always asking.

What is global business services?

KPMG defines global business services (GBS) as the collective set of resources, capabilities and systems to deliver support services such as finance and accounting (F&A), human resources (HR), procurement and other front, middle, and back-office business processes and services across an organization.

Implied in GBS is greater aggregation and leveraging of common information technology (IT) and business processes, models and leading practices to deliver these services more efficiently and effectively than in the past. This is often done on a global scale, using multiple service delivery models including elements of shared services, outsourcing, cloud and, increasingly, intelligent automation.

KPMG research and analysis

Since 2012, KPMG LLP U.S. (KPMG) has conducted ongoing research initiatives based on interviews with global business services leaders at Global 500 and FORTUNE 1000 companies.

We have conducted hundreds of assessments with strong coverage in pharmaceutical, financial services, consumer and technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) industries. Our goal is a deep understanding of:

KPMG's global business services maturity model

Our model defines five levels of maturity, ranging from fragmented to strategic. The assessment and measurement of an organization's service delivery maturity occurs across a range of operating categories such as:

delivery and sourcing strategy

service portfolio

data and analytics

talent management

process excellence

change and program management

enabling technology

enterprise service governance

commercial perspective

tax and risk optimization.

Always balance the benefits of pursuing greater maturity against the cost and complexity of doing so.

Business outcome analyses

Some of the outcomes of maturing global business services we analyze in this research include:

the importance of nimble governance and corporate decision making that results, for example, in faster and better M&A decisions and new business integration

talent management improvement efforts for both line of business and shared services

the role that global business services plays as a foundation for enhanced business and data analytics and development of new measurement tools which are emerging because of the presence of shared services

requirements for managed governance services and the role of third parties in providing them

impacts and opportunities derived from greater adoption of process and cognitive automation technologies.

Join the study

KPMG invites senior managers in global business services organizations to participate in this ongoing study. We conduct a one-hour interview and share all of the research results with participants. All company insight is kept confidential and results are aggregated.